Top 10 Reasons Why #AAPI Need To Vote Today | #OurVoteMatters

It’s that time again – today is Election Day, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. AAPI aren’t traditionally viewed as a significant coalition of voters; yet nothing could be further from the truth. Voting is, in fact, an essential component of American citizenship and a right that all AAPI voters should exercise today and on all Election Days.

Here are the top 10 reasons why you should head to the polls today, if you haven’t already.

1. You should vote today because your vote is important: AAPI are one of the fastest growing voter blocs in the country.

2. You should vote today because voting is a hard-won right for AAPI (and other minorities).

A 19th century political cartoon depicting Chinese Exclusion.

The democratic vote is a central institution for the United States, and the popular vote has been perceived as a powerful symbol of both the right and the responsibility of the American citizen. Yet, at the birth of this country, the right to vote was initially limited predominantly to land-owning White men. It took until 1920 for the women’s suffrage movement to earn the right to vote for women voters.

Meanwhile, the right for AAPI and other minorities was more historically fraught. For much of our history, AAPIs were denied eligibility to American citizenship — and with it the right to vote as would otherwise be granted to naturalized citizens by the 14th Amendment (ratified in 1868). In 1870, Asians were excluded from the Naturalization Act that granted naturalization rights to people of African descent. Subsequent legislation reinforced the ineligibility of many foreign-born Asians — termed “Mongolians” or “Mongoloids” — for naturalized citizenship. Instead our status as “aliens ineligible for citizenship” was used as the basis for further discriminatory laws, up to and including Chinese Exclusion and Japanese internment.

The right to vote for AAPIs is directly linked to our decades-long fight for the right to American citizenship. In 1898, Wong Kim Ark was forced to bring his case to the Supreme Court to establish that he and other non-White US-born minorities were American citizens by the principle of jus soli, a right that remains into today. Foreign-born Asians won the right to naturalized citizenship rights piecemeal: Chinese earned naturalization rights in 1943 with the passage of the Magnuson Act, while it took nearly another five years for the Filipino Naturalization Act to grant the same naturalization rights to Filipinos and ten years for the McCarren-Walter Immigration and Naturalization Act to grant naturalization to Japanese immigrants.

With foreign-born AAPI still representing more than two-thirds of AAPI voters, most AAPI voters are enjoying a right to naturalize as citizens with voting access, a right that is only about sixty years old for most of our community. There are still AAPIs alive today who remember a time when they were denied the right to naturalize and vote.

3. You should vote today because even in 2014 not all AAPI voters get a chance to be heard.

Asian American voters (CNN).

Even with citizenship rights, restrictive voter laws have effectively disenfranchised voters around the country, disproportionately impacting voters of colour. Throughout much of the twentieth century, voter literacy tests largely prevented African American voters from exercising their voting rights. These unfair laws were banned by the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.

So, as an AAPI voter, you need to exercise your right to vote because laws still exist that deny others in our community the ability to exercise that right.

4. You should vote today because lots of AAPIs care about politics and you should too.

Daniel Dae Kim votes and you should too.

Despite obstacles that AAPI voters face at the polls, the AAPI community is highly politically engaged. A recent joint study between AAPI Data and the Center for American Progress reported that 20% of AAPI engage in some form of community activism, 13% contribute funds to political campaigns, and 3% volunteer their time to campaign work. While these numbers are on the low-end relative to other racial groups — Black Americans, for example, donate a great deal of their time to campaign work and community activism — these numbers also dispute the prevailing myth that AAPI are politically apathetic or unengaged.

5. You should vote today because your vote matters: AAPI helped elect President Obama and have been influential in other major races.

President Obama enjoys strong (and visible) support among notable Asian Americans, including John Cho (and Kal Penn) of Harold and Kumar fame. The campaign’s decision to elevate Asian Americans of multiple ages, genders and ethnicities helps emphasize the campaign’s understanding of the diversity of our community.

However, choosing not to vote is equivalent to choosing to not be seen as a voter.

Change in this country comes from political participation and engagement; when AAPIs vote, we declare that we will no longer tolerate a political process that effectively ignores our very existence.

7. You should vote today because the AAPI vote is really up-for-grabs, and the major political parties know it.

In contrast to most racial or ethnic groups, AAPI voters are largely up-for-grabs, politically. In a recent NAAS survey conducted in conjunction with the Asian American Justice Center, a majority of AAPI who chose to declare a party affiliation identified themselves as Democrats; however, more than 50% of interviewed AAPI either identified as Independents or said they were unaffiliated or didn’t know which party to affiliate with. These data strongly suggest that AAPI voters are an up-for-grabs voting bloc, which represents political influence with this country’s two major political parties… but only so long as we also prove our community is a consistent and reliable voting bloc.

8. You should vote today because both Democrats and Republicans want your vote, and they want it bad (although some of them just don’t know how to get it).

The leaders of the Asian Republican Coalition, the GOP’s outreach effort to AAPI voters.

Fairfax is only one of a lengthening list of urban and suburban battlegrounds – from northern New Jersey to the greater Atlanta area, to the streets of Minneapolis and Las Vegas and up and down the West Coast – where the two national parties have focused with new intensity this year on wooing this expansive and diverse immigrant population.

Spurred by President Barack Obama’s landslide victory among Asian-American voters in 2012 and new government data showing Asians outstripping Latinos as the fastest-growing immigrant population, prominent elected officials on both sides of the aisle have called for a stepped-up focus on Americans of Asian descent.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, whose campaign has run TV ads in Vietnamese and offers versions of its website in Mandarin and Hindi, called it essential that the GOP start “showing up” before these communities’ distrust of Republicans gets cemented in place.

“We have a very broad definition of what constitutes the Asian American community,” the group’s vice chairman, Thomas Britt, toldVice. “The Asian Republican Coalition is open to all Americans, including Asian Americans and those of us like me who are not ethnically Asian but have spent 20 years living in Hong Kong.”

9. You should vote today because in several key elections, we could have an historic AAPI first.

Ro Khanna and Mike Honda are squaring off in California’s 17th District today.

The November election will include 22 Asian-American congressional candidates in 12 different states and territories; 39 ran in the primaries. In the 2008 elections, only 13 Asian-American candidates ran for Congress.

Tonight, Democrats and Republicans are in an edge-of-your-seat war to win control of the Senate, and whoever comes out on top will wield major influence in all of these issues, which are slated to come up in the next two years. Comprehensive immigration reform remains one of the final issues on the Obama 8-year agenda, and although most agree that an overhaul of the nation’s immigration policies is dead in the water, ongoing more modest reforms are likely to appear in the coming two years as part of a larger effort to lobby immigrant Asian and Latino voters. In California and New York, race-conscious affirmative action is likely to reappear as a state-wide issue in the coming years, and the makeup of the state legislature will largely decide the outcome of these debates. Who your representatives are in your respective state legislature and in Washington will decide what happens in issues ranging from the abortion debate to the renewed War on Terror.

Is this what you want your SCOTUS to look like?

And, above all, our representatives in Washington will in the next two years very likely be making a critical decision: they will very likely decide the next justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. SCOTUS has a very delicate balance of power between right- and left-leaning justices, and they’ve handed down a long list of influential decisions in the past ten years. Whom do you want sitting in this life-long position? Your vote today will be your one chance to be heard on this and so many other issues.

You should vote today because your voice matters.

Your vote takes just minutes to cast, but will decide the country’s direction of the next two years. Please, take some time this evening to be heard.